November 2025
The Enduring Legacy of Doctor Montgomery
Elvin Montgomery, Jr.: Scholar and Collector of African American History
February, Black History Month, was always a busy time for Elvin Montgomery, Jr., an undergraduate activist who became a scholar of African-American history.
Born into a professional family with deep roots in New Orleans, he graduated at 17 at the top of his class from St. Augustine’s High School, then still an all-Black Catholic boys’ school. Priests there encouraged him to think beyond the South for higher education. At Harvard, he lived in Lowell House and majored in government.
As a resident of Lowell, he walked past the Lampoon Castle at least twice a day every day for two years. One evening, early in the fall of his senior year, he entered the building, began to comp for the literary board, and soon became the Lampoon’s first Black member.
At the time, he was also Vice President and a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of African and Afro-American Students (AAAAS) at Harvard and Radcliffe. His activism increased that year, and after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968, he became a leader of the demonstrations demanding an Afro-American studies department at Harvard. Though Harvard resisted, historical inevitability prevailed. Two younger AAAAS undergraduates joined a faculty study committee as observers, and by 1972 Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department had its first faculty teaching new courses.
Elvin Montgomery received his Harvard BA in June, 1968. College degrees and more were not uncommon in his extended family of doctors and teachers. By the fall, he was in New York City at Columbia embarked on his path toward his MA, M.Phil., and Ph.D., all in psychology. His parents were enormously proud.
Over the course of his academic career he taught psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Fordham University, New York City College of Technology, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. He also had an entrepreneurial life in management consulting, an extension of his teaching around the psychology of organizational leadership.
Always central to his story was his heritage. Trained and certified to appraise artifacts of Black history, he consulted with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and scores of organizations and individuals who shared his interests and curiosity.
He collected thousands of books and was fascinated by the unbound ephemera of manuscripts, letters, magazines, newspapers, posters, clippings, photographs, invitations, and the memorabilia of Black institutions and the lives of people in the African Diaspora. Eventually he bought, sold, and exhibited everything relating to Black achievements, traditions, and daily experiences.
In Black History Month, he created annual exhibitions, focused on themes of the American Black experience and lectured to professional associations and collectors, often at Columbia and NYU, as well as the institutions where he taught. Harlem and nearby venues hosting his talks included the Schomburg Institute, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Riverside Church.
His book, Collecting African American History (2001), features scores of evocative photos from his own collection and beyond. In large format, it includes portraits and informal pictures of social, cultural, educational, political, religious, and civil-rights leaders, as well as signed posters, record covers, memorabilia of the Harlem Renaissance, and of Black writers, artists, musicians, preachers, activists, veterans, stars of baseball’s Negro League and other athletes. And useful tips for collectors abound.
His daughter Monica Octavia Montgomery, a museum curator working on Philadelphia’s 250th anniversary celebration of the events of 1776, recalls weekends with her dad combing through the offerings of his favored flea-market dealers across Manhattan and Brooklyn. “He called the folks he worked with his ‘buddies’”, she said. “He was often just as eager to sell to them as he was to buy for his own collection.”
Elvin Montgomery lived for the last decades of his life in Morningside Heights across the street from Columbia Teachers College and half a block east of Union Theological Seminary and Riverside Church. A regular parishioner at Riverside, he was an active member of its Church fellowships, established a scholarship for African students seeking higher education, and taught both Sunday School and the Men’s Class. He maintained a well-trained meditative Buddhist spiritual practice in addition to his Christian faith.
Following his death in November 2022, his daughter and her mother, Sandra A. Brannon, Elvin’s former wife, cleared his apartment and carefully stored his collections. Monica O. Montgomery has created a new organization DiasporaDNA Story Center (DiasporaDNA.org) to showcase his collection and interests, initially online, and later in physical spaces in Philadelphia and his hometown of New Orleans.
Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research awarded Elvin Montgomery (and nine of his activist colleagues) its W.E.B. DuBois Medal in 2000, its inaugural year. The medal goes to “individuals who have made a significant contribution to the fields of African and African American culture and studies from a variety of different fields.”
“Unfortunately,” his daughter said, “My dad apparently never learned of the honor.” As recently as 2016, the award was mentioned in an introduction before Professor Montgomery’s talk at the annual meeting of the American Ephemera Society. Early in his speech, he said, “One little correction…, I am not a recipient of the DuBois Medal, even though I am an admirer of that gentleman and a collector of some of his stuff for years.”
In November 2024 Monica O.Montgomery wrote to the Hutchins Center to ask about the medal. No one at the center knew why Elvin had not learned it had been awarded to him, but Professor Henry Louis Gates said they would gladly strike a new one with his name and the inscription: “With deepest appreciation for your contribution to the creation of the Department of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University.”
Elvin’s daughter says she expects to receive the DuBois Medal at the Hutchins Center early in 2025, and “It will be prominently displayed in every major exhibition mounted by the DiasporaDNA Story Center.”
- DMI ’68